Diane Beckett: An iron lady whose faith rebuilt her family

"It’s sort of in the blood,” Amanda Thatcher remarked to Tory MP Rob Wilson when he congratulated the 19-year-old on her poised, emphatic reading from Ephesians, which will remain one of the abiding images of her grandmother’s funeral. He took her reply, as did many watching the service, to be a reference to the genes she shared with the prime minister – who described her two grandchildren in her declining years as “my greatest delight”.

But those who know the university student Amanda Thatcher, and her 24-year-old chemistry graduate brother Michael, believe the real credit for how well they have turned out should go to their mother, Diane Beckett, who attended the funeral at Baroness Thatcher’s request, despite her 2005 divorce from Sir Mark Thatcher and his remarriage. “Two extraordinary children raised by an extraordinary mother,” says Beckett’s close friend Adryana Boyne.

The downside of living in the shadow of a famous family member is something that Baroness Thatcher’s own children know all too painfully.

“To many people,” Carol Thatcher has written, “I wasn’t really an individual so much as an adjunct to my mother.” The trials and tribulations of her globe-trotting twin, Sir Mark, have been extensively catalogued, including his involvement in a 2004 coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea that led to a four-year suspended jail sentence and the end of his 18-year marriage to 52-year-old Diane.

“You can be in love with someone,” she commented in an interview in 2006 – to date her only public remarks – “but know you can’t live with them.” She moved back with the children – who still live with her – to the exclusive Highland Park suburb of Texas, close to her own family. Sir Mark has been pretty absent from their lives since he was banned from entering the US because of his conviction for the attempted coup. He now lives in Spain with his second wife, Sarah Jane.

Mark Thatcher and Diane Burgdorf met in Texas in 1986. She was seven years younger than him, had worked as an estate agent and was the daughter of a millionaire car dealer. He had given up his unsuccessful and accident-prone attempts to be a professional racing driver and was working as the Dallas representative of Lotus cars.

Becoming another Mrs Thatcher catapulted Diane uneasily into the public eye. The couple married on Valentine’s Day, 1987, at the Queen’s Chapel, next to the Savoy in London. Her mother-in-law had invited so many guests that some of the Burgdorfs had to stand outside. Two years later, when Michael was born, the prime minister proudly announced to the press corps in Downing Street: “We are a grandmother.”

Mark continued thereafter with his love-hate relationship with his famous surname. He scowled at any press attention (at their wedding the couple were labelled by photographers “the bride and gloom”). Yet he used the name to build a business career and a multi-million pound fortune that funded a lavish lifestyle with nannies and butlers in London, Dallas, Switzerland and South Africa.

The bedrock of the life of Diane and her children is their belief in God. That was something that excluded Mark Thatcher, at best only an occasional churchgoer. “He accused me,” his ex-wife recalled, “of trying to shove Christianity down his throat.” When she began a weekly Bible study group at their home in Cape Town, he complained because attendees parked on the grass.

Diane Beckett (she married again in 2008 and took the surname of her new husband, publishing millionaire James Beckett) is usually described as an Evangelical Christian. The same is applied to her children. To a British audience, it is a tag-line, when combined with their Texan accents, that conjures up images of the worst excesses of American tele-evangelists, of Billy Graham-style hellfire and damnation pulpit oratory – and of the “Religious Right” and its pin-up Sarah Palin.

“What being an Evangelical Christian really means,” explains Adryana Boyne, in the only interview she has granted about her close friendship with Lady Thatcher’s daughter-in-law and grandchildren, “is that you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It is not about belonging to a denomination. It is about realising that we need a saviour because we are sinners. That informs how you are and everything you do.”

Mexican-born Boyne runs VOCES (Voices Offering Conservative Empowering Solutions) in Dallas, a Christian-based, not-for-profit, educational organisation working with the Hispanic community. Michael Thatcher sat on its trustee board, and it was Boyne’s minister husband, Daryl, who officiated at the marriage of Diane and James Beckett.

“Church life is very important to us,” she says. “And, like me, Mrs Beckett is certainly someone who prays in small groups. We are both strongly pro-life and hold that abortion is not an option. Her faith is something that has given her the courage to be the best mother she can be. What you saw at the funeral was that same faith. Amanda made an impact because she read with conviction. She knows God, and that is because she has a mother who loves the Lord.”

Diane Beckett’s resolute faith was not simply something she retreated into, as many before her have, in the face of a marriage that ended in acrimonious divorce eight years ago. Her ex-husband, she revealed in her interview the following year, was treating her “with contempt”. He had been selfish, abusive, unfaithful, “a chronic liar”, preferred a “playboy lifestyle”, and was “too harsh” on his son (who will one day inherit the baronetcy first bestowed on Denis Thatcher). “As a mother,” she said, “I am finding it hard to forgive him for the pain he has caused our children.”

Such behaviour might make anyone fall to their knees and pray for deliverance, but those who know Diane stress that her faith long predates her first meeting with the son of the prime minister. As a young woman, she attended Southern Methodist University, an avowedly religious institution (alma mater, too, of George W Bush’s wife, Laura).

If her two husbands have very different attitudes to religion (James Beckett is also an Evangelical Christian – “our mutual love for Christ is the reason we found each other,” she has said), they do share one characteristic. Both are rich, and the Bible teaches that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Diane Beckett has tried to square that circle. When presented with a $10 million home as a wedding present by her second husband, she insisted that it was too ostentatious and made him sell it.

James Beckett now channels his fortune into a charity that promotes “best business principles consistent with Biblical principles”. And there are reports that the couple, and Diane’s children, have spent time working overseas as volunteer Christian missionaries.

She went to great lengths to keep her children in touch with their grandmother without plunging them into the spotlight. When news broke of Baroness Thatcher’s death, Diane called the local police to disperse the press corps who had gathered outside her house. Perhaps she fears that they might follow in the footsteps of their father. “He was given one of the best seats at the banquet of life,” she reflected, “and he’s blown it.”

“They say that material wealth can spoil people,” muses Boyne. “But this is not the case with Mrs Beckett and her children. One of the things we do is get together for regular games nights, play together, eat together, laugh together and pray together. Just like other families.”

One detail, though, potentially spoils this Christian picture: Diane’s 2006 interview reads like an act of revenge on Mark (he had been involved with his second wife, at his side at the funeral, during his first marriage). “Abusers,” Diane told her interviewer, “have control over you as long as you remain silent. I had to break that silence.” Yet the justification she gave for her harsh words was inevitably grounded in her religious conviction. “My Christian faith gave me the courage to come forward with my story.”

That faith is what makes Diane Beckett tick, what slowly won her mother-in-law’s admiration (“[Mark] had had so many women before that she hadn’t felt I would stick around”), and what she has instilled in the two young people who made such a positive impression this week – albeit as chips off a different block from the one we had assumed.